Two Steps Foward, Two To Go: Black Mage, Flare Star, and Thunderhead.

[ElevatedCosmonaut]

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I agree. Even back in HW, we had short fire phases, to help with movement, alignment, or whatever. That needed flexibility is just gone now. This whole debacle has definitely taken a toll on me, and black mages at large. Why do you think that there were so few Black Mages when the tier launched? It's just not fun to play in its current state. We need either more reversions to EW BLM, or to fix what we say is broken or unfun (Flare Star's strictness, Thunderhead being very restrictive, and manafont being a very unfun cooldown.) Please, listen to us. This job is very important to us.

We don't need a rework, we dont need drastic action to make our damage profile more bursty, we just need some tweaks and we'll be fine.

[Atmaweapon510]

The current design for Black Mage seems to be based around making sure that all unintended and sometimes, frankly unintuitive spell lines like double Transpose will never out-damage the proper rotation. This is why they even removed Ice Paradox at the beginning, they were so focused on eliminating any chance of Infinite Paradox coming back that they didn't even consider how bad that would feel (that, or they figured they needed to remove a GCD from the Ice Phase to fit in Flare Star.)

Astral Souls and Flare Star as a concept aren't unsalvageable though. A viable single target spell that "speeds up" the Fire Phase by giving multiple Astral Souls like Flare should solve most of the flexibility and timing issues. In fact, Flare could just be repurposed back into a cleave spell that's viable in single target and now at any point in the Fire Phase (assuming Umbral hearts) you can just Flare once or twice to quickly unlock Flare Star. After that, they just need to revert most of the Thunder changes and BLM could be back in a great spot where you don't need to consult a spreadsheet to actually figure out which lines are dps gains/ minimal losses.

Also, I don't play BLM often but I can say that having instant Fire Paradox is a godsend.

[OliverQ]

Flare Star just seems like a really poor, punishing design. It's barely stronger than Despair, considering what it takes to build up to it, you lose that damage if AF drops, and a personal, minor nitpick, but who thought the Flare Star SFx was a good idea? It sounds like somebody is hitting a brass pot with a *tink* sound. It should sound like a massive explosion.